What About Worldbuilding? #28 - Portal Sins

Can someone please tell me how the hell it is June already?

Portal Sins

Let’s forego my usual rambling and get to the topic at hand: PORTALS.

Now, for those of you in the know… or who happen to slide into my DMs from time to time… this topic was almost definitely not, but also kind of probably, inspired by me being hip-deep in a Stargate franchise rewatch.

I would never let my fanboying dictate the content of this post.

Never!

Unless I did.

Well, whatever. Let’s talk about portals! Magical, Scientifical, Paranormal… something else that ends with -al.

From a certain point of view...

Let’s take a step back and look at portals as a whole, absent genre, to examine what exactly they’re meant to accomplish.

Many stories that make use of some doorway to another place exist, and they come in so many different forms that going through the list now would be a waste of both words and effort on my part. They do, however, have one thing in common: point of view.

Perspective is key here, as perspective offers the foundation upon which portal stories work. You take a point of view, a world view if you will, and then push it through the proverbial portal into a new place entirely.

You disassociate the point of view from their frame of reference, and wonderful things happen. The most readily apparent forms of this should be obvious, be it fantasy or science-fiction, but this displacement from a comfortable frame of reference actually occurs in many different kinds of stories.

Allow me to offer an example: Mira is a 20-something living in a thriving metropolis somewhere on the west coast. Idk, let’s call it San Porteattle. Now let’s have her suddenly relocate to somewhere more rural unexpectedly. What happens to Mira’s point of view and frame of reference?

Culture shock and pesky reality aside, is this not venture through some magical doorway into the relative unknown? Is she not now in a faraway and unfamiliar place, missing both her day-to-day expectations and severed from her personal connections? (Nobody is to bring up the internet. I’m aware the internet exists. That’s beside the point.)

Take the situation and reverse it, rural to city… that’s another portal-ish thing.

Straight-shooting, by the book Cop is thrust into a criminal underworld she didn’t know existed? Portal

Local drunk falls asleep in an alley and wakes up in the trunk of a car? POrtal.

Little Red Riding Hood braving the woods to grandma’s house? PORtal

An inner-city student gets a scholarship to some prestigious University? PORTal

Aunt June’s favorite local grocer closes and she’s forced to explore a Costco? PORTAl

[I’m getting tired…]

Don’t get bogged down by a fantasy or science-fiction frame here, because exploration offered by this sort of perspective shift can be an incredibly fun and meaningful exploration of perspective.

Now… shifting gears just a little bit.

Actual Magic and Sci-Fi and Stuff

FINE. I’ll do it.

Okay. Here’s the deal. Portal fantasy & sci-fi falls, in my estimation, into two types. There might be more, but I settled on two and you’re going to have to live with it or disparage my opinion in the comments.

Numero uno… You go through the portal and end up in a secondary setting. This secondary setting is the primary location for your story and the existential threats and scope of the story is firmly set within this world. I cannot emphasize this enough… if your focus is on this secondary setting then FOCUS on it. Don’t spend too much time in the “world that was”. Don’t drag out your introduction.

Look at Narnia. Train, mansion, wardrobe, lamppost. Boom, done. The “world that was” is left behind. The focus is on Narnia.

If your centerpiece is this secondary world, don’t waste time on a setting that doesn’t matter.

Now that’s just the first approach. Second… well second is Stargate. (Wait, was I supposed to do that part in Spanish?)

Okay, okay. I know. I promised I wasn’t basing this entire post on the Stargate franchise and, well, I’m not... But I also am just for this point.

From the Stargate perspective of this whole portal thing, the doorway represents both the thrill of the unknown and the threat of it. And that last part, that’s key here. The threat is to the commonplace, the world that the character already knows. Their very concept of normal is challenged by this window into another perspective.

And with this, you can expand on the “world that was” because the threat to that world is kind of the entire point of the unknown being in place.

Okay, I have more Stargate to watch important work to do that’s important.

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^PORTAL!